Katie R - Blog 5 - YIVO's "People of a Thousand Towns"

The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research has several digital exhibitions, but the only one with more than 8 images is "People of a Thousand Towns:" the Online Catalog of Photographs of Jewish Life in Prewar Eastern Europe. While searchable, the catalog also offers online albums of thematically grouped photos.

Collection Principles:

The YIVO Institute explains that this group of photographs is strictly of Eastern European Jewish communities pre-WWII, and in many cases are the only documents left of some of the towns that were completely destroyed by the Nazis. The photos range from the late 19th Century to the 1940's. The images available online are not the entirety of YIVO's holdings.


Object Characteristics:

The images in this collection are jpegs, but not scanned from the original photograph but "instead, are JPEGS created in a batch process from the analog videodisc." In the mid-1980's, YIVO received a grant to put 15,000 images on videodisc. Another grant in 1993 led to improvements in the catalog database. The current online catalog metamorphosis of this collection stemmed from a 2002 grant. These different steps in reformatting the photographs is interesting in a preservation aspect, as Best Practices shift and non-profit organizations try to work with the funding and resources available to them (although I have actually never heard of a videodisc being a 'best practice'). It seems that first YIVO was really worried about reformatting the images, then realized the access wasn't at its finest if searching was an issue. Now the online option is having its time in the spotlight. But without exceptional metadata, a new grant should be in the pipeline to index and rescan the photographs.



Metadata:

The images have little information attached to them, but importantly they are linked to the catalog number. Internal information including collection, catalog number, and Record ID is included, as well as date, location and a general description. But for such an important and large collection of photographs, more metadata should be attached to the files in order to sustain this catalog into the future.

Intended Audience:

I would assume the YIVO Institute would want as many people to view this collection as possible, but to actually search the catalog, you must register to login. The online albums are accessible, but this is only a slight fraction of the holdings. Registering allows a user to visit the site/catalog for 7 days, afterwhich you must re-register. Perhaps this is an effort to keep track of users of the catalog and make sure no anonymous mis-use happens. People interested in Judaica, geneology, history, and social sciences would enjoy this collection.